The Problems of Work 1956 Chapter 1

Chapter One: On What Does Holding a Job Depend?

On what does holding a job depend?

Familial connections? Who you know? Personal charm? Luck? Education? Industry? Interest? Intelligence? Personal ability?

To one grown old and even somewhat cynical in the world of work, the first several seem to have dominance. Only the young appear to be left with the illusion or delusion that Personal Ability, Intelligence, Interest, Education and Industry have anything to do with it; and the very, very cynical would have us believe that indeed these are only the symptoms of being very young.

We have too often seen the son become the foreman, the new son-in-law, yesterday the shipping clerk, soar to board membership, and we all too often have known that the son and son-in-law not only had no aptitude in the first place but that with no fear of discipline they act more carelessly of the firm than the worst employee present. Familial connection is something dependent upon the accident of birth.

But, leaving familial connection until some other day, what have we left? There is Who You Know. Personal connection plays a dominant part in obtaining, keeping and improving a position, there can be no doubt of this. One has a friend who works for the Jim-Jambo Company; the friend knows of an opening; the friend has other friends and these still other friends and so into the Jim Jambo Company one can settle down and work with some security and hope of rise.

And then there is the matter of personal charm. How often have we seen the young stenographer who couldn’t spell “cat” suddenly soar, with her typing fingers still all thumbs, to the post of the executive secretary to the boss, wherein, while she can’t spell “cat” any better, she can certainly spell raise and raise again and perhaps even “supper club” or diamond necklace. And we have also seen the young man with a good “front” soar above his elders because he could perhaps tell the right joke or play a slightly worse game of golf.

We have seen, too, the factor of Education all gone awry in firms and governments and the trained man, at how much cost of eyesight become learned beyond credit, yet passed over for some chap who didn’t have a degree to his name beyond a certain degree of push. We have seen the untutored madly ordering the millions and the wise advising a score.

Industry as well seems to have scant place to those cynical few of us who have seen it all. The eagerness of the young to slave is all too often braked by the older head who says, “Why get in a sweat about it, young’un? It’ll all come out the same.” And perhaps we’ve stayed after hours and daubed ourselves with ink, or lingered at our post beyond all demand of duty, only to watch in times to come the lazy one we scorned draw the better pay. And we’ve said it isn’t justice -- something less than that.

And Interest, too, we’ve seen come all to naught. When our absorption in the deadly game of firm or unit with its rivals made us lay aside neglected our own wife, or life, and when we’ve burned the night and leisure time to work out solutions gauged to save our firm, and have sent them in, and have had them come back, neglected, and soon have beheld our fellow worker, whose total interest was a man or stamps and not the firm at all, go up to higher posts, we had some cause to be less interested, we thought. And Interest in our work became condemned by those around us who, not understanding it, became tired of hearing it in our mouths.

Intelligence, against this hard beaten parade of broken illusions, would seem to have no bearing whatever upon our fates. When we see the stupid rule the many, when we see the plans and decisions passed which would have been condemned even by the children of the workers, we wonder what Intelligence could have to do with it. Better to be dumb, we might come to think, than have our own wits continually outraged by the stupidities which pass for company planning.

Personal ability, against this torrent, this confusing chaos of random causes for promotion and better pay, would seem a wasted item. We have seen our own wasted. We have seen the abilities of others scorned. We have seen the unable rise while the able remained neglected or even unemployed. So personal ability would not seem the factor it might once have been to us, small cogwheels in the clashing gears of business fate. It must then certainly be luck and nothing but luck the whole way down.

And so it seems to appear even to an “experienced” eye that the obtaining, the holding, and the improving of a job are all dependent upon a chaos of causes, all of them out of our control. We accept, instead of orderly expectancy, a tumbling mass of accidentals as our fate.

We try a little. We dress well and cleanly in order to apply for a position, we take ourselves to the place of work daily, we shuffle the papers or the boxes or the machinery parts in a fashion we hope will pass, we leave by crowded transport to our homes and expect another day’s dull toil.

Occasionally we start up a correspondence course to give us a small edge on our fellows -- and often drop it before it is done: it seems that we cannot even do this little to help us on our way against this flood of accidentals.

We become ill. We run out of sick leave. Still but hardly recovered we now have no job. We become the victims of an accidental cabal or slander and we have no job. We are thrust up against jobs we cannot do and then again we have no job. We grow too old, our time is spent in remembering how fast we once were, and one day we have no job.

The lot of the man in the work-a-day world is Uncertainty. His goal is Security. But only few attain this goal. The rest of us worry from day to day, from year to year, about our ability to get work, hold work, improve our lots. And all too often our worst fears take place. Once we had the rich to look toward and envy, but now the taxes which we bear have reduced, despite their clever accountants, even their number. States and governments rise and promise us all Security and then give us restrictions which make that seem shaky too.

From day to day new threats impose themselves on our consciousness. A world where the machine is king makes Man a cog, and we are told of new developments which do the work of thousands of us and so we starve.

The advertisements thrust at us in our transports, newspapers, streets, radios and TV all manner of things to own. And no matter how delightful they are to own, WE the men who make them can’t own them -- not on our pay. And Christmases leave us a little ashamed at how little we can buy and we make the coat do just another year. And the years advance and we grow no younger. And each hour confronts us with the accidents which might make or break our futures. No wonder we believe in luck alone.

Well, there is the problem.

To eat we must have a job. To live we must continue to be acceptable on our jobs. To better ourselves we must hope for the breaks. And it all appears a huge, disheartening confusion composed of accidents, good luck and bad luck, or drudgery with nothing to win at the end of it.

What would you give for something to lift you out of such ruts? Perhaps you are not in them but if not you’re one of the lucky ones. Men, to escape these ruts, have perpetrated the bloodiest wars and revolutions of history. Whole dynasties have been cut to the dust in an overpowering convulsion born from despair. Jobs get few. Holding them becomes more and more accidental. At last none can longer stand the strain of insecurity and the answer is raw, red revolution. And does this come to anything? No. Revolution is that act of displacing a tyranny with a tyranny ten times more despotic than the old. Changing governments, not even changing firms can change basic security.

The quest for security is a quest for constancy and peace. A worker deserves these things. He creates the goods. He should have the wherewithal to live. Instead, he has a chaos.

But where is this chaos? Is it in the worker’s family? Some say so. Is it in the character of capital? Some say so. Is this chaos born of bad government? Many have said so. Is it in the worker himself? Some would like him to think that.

No, it is not in any of these things. The chaos of insecurity exists in the chaos of data about work and about people. If you have no compasses by which to steer through life, you get lost. So many recent elements -- of the Industrial Age -- have entered into life that life itself needs to be better understood.

Work and security are parts of life. If life is not understood then neither will these parts of life be understood. If all life seems chaotic, a matter of guess and chance, then certainly work will seem chaotic.

But the role of work in existence is a greater role than any other. Some say we spend a third of our lives in bed and therefore beds are important. But we spend more than a third of our lives at work and if we don’t work we don’t have a bed, so it seems that work is more important by far. If you add up the various parts of life, love or sports or entertainment, you will find that the majority of concentration is not on any of these but upon WORK. Work is the major role of our existences whether we like it or not. If we don’t like it we don’t like life.

If we find a man a bit insane, old time “ologies” would have had us look up his love- life or his childhood. A newer idea and a better one is to look up his security and conditions of work. As Security goes bad in a nation, insanity rises. If we were to attack national insanity problems and conquer them we wouldn’t build better insane asylums -- we would better the conditions of work.

Life is seven-tenths work, one-tenth familial, one-tenth political and one-tenth relaxation. Economics -- the paycheck, struggle for -- is seven-tenths of existence. Lose a man his income or his job and you find him in bad mental condition, usually. If we’re going to find proofs of this anywhere, we’ll find them everywhere. Worry over security, worry over worth, worries about being able to do things in life for others, are the principal worries of existence. Let’s be very simple. People with nothing to do, people without purpose most easily become neurotic or mad. Work, basically, is not a drudgery, it is something to do. The pay-check tells us we are worth something. And of course it buys us what we have to have to live. Or almost does.

All right. Work-security, then, is important. But security itself is an understanding. Insecurity is UNKNOWNNESS. When one is Insecure, he simply doesn’t know. He is not sure. Men who KNOW are secure. Men who don’t know believe in luck. One is made insecure by not knowing whether or not he is going to be sacked. Thus he worries. And so it is with all insecurity. INSECURITY EXISTS IN THE ABSENCE OF KNOWLEDGE. All security derives from knowledge.

One KNOWS he will be cared for no matter what happens. That is a security. In the absence of certain knowledge it could also be a fallacy. Luck is chance. To depend upon luck is to depend upon not-knowingness.

But in truth how could one have knowledge about life when life itself had not been brought, as knowledge, into order. When the subject of life itself was a chaos, how could work, as a part of life, be anything but a chaos?

If LIVINGNESS is an unknown subject, then WORKINGNESS and all pertaining to work must be an unknown subject, exposed to cynicism, hopelessness and guesses.

To obtain, hold and improve a job, one would have to know the exact, precision rules of life if one were to have a complete security. It would not be enough to know, fairly well, one’s job. That would not be a security, for as time went on we would see, as we have listed, too many chances entering into it.

Knowledge of the general underlying rules of life would bring about a security of life. Knowledge of the underlying rules of life would also bring about a security in a job.

Scientology is a science of life. It is the first entirely Western effort to understand life. All earlier efforts came from Asia or Eastern Europe. And they failed. None of them gave greater security. None of them could change human behavior for the better. None of them -- and they bragged about it -could change human intelligence. Scientology is something new under the sun, but young as it is, it is still the only completely and thoroughly tested and validated science of existence. It doesn’t demand twenty years of sitting on spikes to find out one is mortal. It doesn’t demand a vast study of rats to know that Man is confused.

Scientology can and does change human behavior for the better. It puts the individual under the control of himself -- where he belongs. Scientology can and does increase human intelligence. By the most exact tests known it has been proven that Scientology can greatly increase intelligence in an individual. And Scientology can do other things. It can reduce reaction time and it can pull the years off one’s appearance. But there is no intention here to give a list of all it can do. It is a science of life and it works. It adequately handles the basic rules of life and it brings order into chaos.

A science of life would be, actually, a science of good order. Such things as accidents and luck would, if you could but understand their underlying principles, be under your control.

As we have seen here, even those who aren’t cynical can see that many chances enter into obtaining, holding and improving one’s job. Some of these chances seem so wide and out of control that nothing at all could be done about them. If we could but reduce the chanciness of a job. If we could make the right friends and be sure that our education would count and have some slight security that our interest and intelligence and native ability would not go all to waste, why then, things would be better, wouldn’t they?

Well, we’ll see what Scientology can do to reduce the chanciness of the work-a-day world -- for you and for those you know. What’s life all about anyway?